Pages

Monday, March 05, 2012

Going the Distance

I've been busy. No, really.

I just haven't completed the first pass of revisions on the novel I wrote last November. Not because I don't want to have them done - I do! - but as I dove in headfirst I realized I wasn't ready to do it.

That's important. One must be ready to do the work. It's one thing to think of it as being work, it's another to do it. I know exactly what has to be done - the cuts that have to be made, the additions that must be written - and I'm ready to do it.

From a distance.

I'm not ready to jump back into that pool and start treading water. I need some good motivation to get it going. My motivation so far is that I need to get this book ready to shop around. That's it. That's all the motivation I have to finish it. Is that enough?

Well, yeah. It should be anyway.

What's happened to keep me busy is that the day job in late January and throughout February kept me on my toes and while that was going on I was trying to finish up another story that will see the light of day some time this year. I've also become more concerned (as noted here) that I can do more with this blog to make it a little more interactive and websitey but that may just be my mind making excuses not to get back to the novel. So yeah, life got in the way and there was plenty of that.

Additionally, I just needed to be a little farther away from the completion of the novel. There was so much energy that went into just finishing the thing (and it's the first novel I've completed that I felt like was worth going back to and working on) that I had no idea how much it had drained me.

I've said it before that writing is WORK. It sure looks easy to sit down at a keyboard and type away until the wee hours of the morning but anyone who's done it will tell you unequivocally that it isn't. There's a lot of thought that goes in and that kind of work - while different than physical labor - can be very draining. I just didn't know how much and now I do.

Thing is, I don't know how to communicate that to you. I can tell you that I've just felt like there wasn't any fuel in the tank but that's not exactly true. I've felt like writing just not working like a fiend on that particular story. My history of writing so far has been to complete a story and move on. Having something this good and this big is all new territory and it's scary. And by scary I mean daunting, harrowing, and just plain terrifying.

So I've been busy, yeah, but I haven't been doing the work I anticipated doing. And life got in the way.